Spaceflightnow.com Covers Shuttle Launch With Great Detail

Fifty years ago families would gather together on Sunday night and sit in front of the TV as Ed Sullivan unrolled a star-studded hour of entertainment. The Sullivan show was a perfect example of the "broad" in broadcasting. It was made to reach a widely diverse audience. It would die a gruesome death on TV today. No contemporary kid will wait through the opera singer for the promise of Topo Gigio. Broadcasting has more-and-more given way to narrowcasting.

A perfect example is streaming now--Spaceflightnow.com's live coverage of the launch of STS-125, the Atlantis mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. The coverage is an inch wide and a thousand miles deep!

While the cable news networks dedicate a few minutes to this mission, Spaceflightnow.com is covering it like a multimillion dollar NASA procured thermal blanket. The streaming coverage is anchored by former CNN space expert Miles O'Brien and a cast of experts nerdy enough to make me look suave! This is narrowcasting and by definition it's not for everyone. You must really want to be immersed to watch this.

Though the quality of the video has been pretty good there have been moments when the video frame rate made it look choppy. I am disappointed there are only two options for viewer size--the too small embedded player or too large full screen view. Sometimes, when more that one mic is on at the same time, phasing problems make the audio a little thin. For a narrow and motivated audience these are minor blips.